Yeah, like I could go today without writing. I\’ve been writing my fucking ass off, both manually and typing. My feelings have been running the gamut. I know people in New York City, people who haven\’t turned up yet. I\’m dating someone who\’s in the Navy (don\’t ask) and has been deployed. My classes were canceled. I never shut up. So I feel qualified to talk.
My hard drive has died again, and this time my computer is in the shop. This newsletter has been pieced together throughout the day, mostly on an old 486 that belongs to my family and from the computer lab on campus, so my apologies if the thoughts don\’t flow together as well as they should. I\’m in a bit of a rush as I have to go to work in about seven hours. Yes, life as a retail slut will continue even while the world is blowing up. Some things never change.
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I was nine years old when I realized that living in D.C. had it\’s disadvantages if we went to war. George Bush Sr. was in office, and I sat working on my homework as it was announced we would be officially going to war in the Middle East.
That chilling impact, the realization that the D.C. area could face bombings, terrorist attacks, a military state, and worse has been with me for the past eleven years, and the fear doubles every time we launch an attack off of U.S. soil.
For the past three years, my plan of action should we ever go to war with danger on U.S. soil has been the same: get the fuck out of this \”our balls are bigger than yours and our missiles have better guidance systems than yours\” country. I have my passport and all my papers together, and I always have enough money for a last minute plane ticket to Europe.
My plan was dashed today when reality set in.
When the planes hit the World Trade Center towers in New York City, I was on the metro in D.C. on my way to school, listening to Atari Teenage Riot and Le Tigre and planning my attendance at the IMF/World Bank protest in two weeks. Sometime around 10am I was just passing through D.C. when I noticed several scared looking people board the train. I began to notice that everyone on the train looked terrified and shaken. I took off my headphones, and stepped into my worst nightmare.
Everyone has already heard the details. Four hijacked planes. Two planes crashing into the World Trade Center buildings, later causing three total building collapses. One downed plane in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. And in my own backyard, one plane crashing into the Pentagon.
Nationwide shock, terror, disbelief. Worldwide sympathy.
Fuck your sympathy. There are terrorist attacks happening all over the world – not on this scale, but then, no one is close to our level of megalomania. Sympathy is not what we need. We need solidarity, and blood, lots and lots of blood.
I went to a blood drive that was organized at my local Red Cross in Maryland. Dozens, if not a few hundred people showed up. I\’ve heard the same about blood drives all over the Washington, D.C. and New York City metropolitan areas. So many volunteers have turned up at local hospitals and Red Cross units that people are being turned away. This is a good thing.
It is also a sick thing.
It has been said that extreme actions call for extreme reactions. This has been an extreme action, and people are reacting extremely.
Despite what you may or may not have heard, D.C., Maryland and Virginia have proclaimed States of Emergency. There is a military state practically in my front yard. There have been F16s flying over my house all day. I tried to drive into the city and was questioned by the cops and \”firmly asked\” to go home.
There are cops on every corner, and many of our streets in the city are closed off. There are military police with big mean guns patrolling our streets. Anyone who looks of Arabian descent is being pulled over and held for questioning while their vehicles are searched. Mosques are being guarded by armed police in case the public try to \’retaliate\’ on their own soil.
Different people are saying different things. Some could care less and are upset because all of tonight\’s baseball games have been postponed. Some people think we should stop stalling and bomb the crap out of Bin Laden. Some people think this means war, and other people think all of this will be taken care of with a short, strategical political maneuvering.
There are people out there who honestly believe that our government will find the terrorists and bring them to trial and justice on American soil. There are other people who swear that this is the start of the third world war.
And me, what do I think? I\’m keeping my options open. We could go any way on this.
There are a few things I know for sure. I have a new respect for Bush. Now don\’t get me wrong – I don\’t like the man in the slightest. But he could have stayed away from Washington, hid in an underground bunker in Colorado or Nebraska. Instead, he came back to D.C. Sure, he waited until things had calmed down, but the point is he came back. He could have hid like a total coward. It takes guts to come back here, and I applaud him for it.
Beyond that, the man can suck my feminine dick.
His statements have said absolutely nothing except that he plans to \”punish\” any government or group that works with or harbors the terrorists. That means we could be seeing a lot more killing of a lot more innocent people.
With this policy of grouping together sympathizers with actual terrorists, we could be looking at the slaughtering of thousands. The current speculation is that Bin Laden is to blame; the problem with that is the Taliban in Afghanistan have released a statement saying that it wasn\’t Bin Laden, that the man doesn\’t have those kinds of resources. If we assume that Afghanistan is lying, it will mean we will have to consider them to be protecting Bin Laden, which will mean declaring war on and bombing Afghanistan.
Just because they killed our civilians, infiltrated our vulnerable security, is no reason to go bombing places just because we think they are related to the terrorists. And we\’ve been doing that for months already. When the African embassies and the USS Cole were bombed, we retaliated by bombing places in the Middle East that we thought were connected with Bin Laden. Innocent people were slaughtered in their sleep.
There\’s also this little issue of a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Washington by a Middle Eastern factory owner. We bombed his factory because we thought he was connected with Bin Laden; he wasn\’t, and his entire factory was destroyed, along with many peoples\’ lives being taken. We were obviously motivated to press a button and destroy, but not enough to get our facts straight first.
In short, we\’re in for an interesting ride. Bush Jr could follow his father\’s footsteps and indiscriminately start bombing where ever he feels might be tied to Bin Laden (or which ever other terrorist group), or he could do the \’humane\’ thing and track the assholes down with some super-sleuth assassins and blow their fucking brains out. In the nicest, most pacifistic and diplomatic way, of course.
I want justice just as much as the next human rights activist, but I\’m also a pissed off realist with a bad attitude, armed only with my pen, notebook, and brain.
